medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (13. March) is the feast day of:
1) Sabinus of Hermopolis (d. ca. 307). We know about S. from an at least semi-legendary Passio (two versions: BHG 1612 and 1612c). This makes him a resident of Hermopolis in Egypt (from what's known of S.'s persecutor, the Hermopolis in Upper Egypt, today's Al–Ashmunayn) who during the Great Persecution retreated with fellow Christians into the neighboring countryside. There he lived in a hut and was kind to a beggar who for two small coins later denounced him to the authorities. Arrested, S. was interrogated by the governor Arrianus, before whom he maintained the superiority of the Christian religion, and was then condemned. He underwent various tortures before being killed by drowning in the Nile. As S. had predicted at the moment of his death, his body was found three days later. Thus far the Passio.
Byzantine synaxaries and menaia have notices of S. generally according with elements of his Passio. They commemorate him on 11., 12., or 14. March. The source from which S. entered the early RM under today's date has not been identified.
Some views of the re-erected columns of this Hermopolis' fifth-century Christian basilica dedicated to the BVM:
http://tinyurl.com/y8v7qrf
http://tinyurl.com/ydnrr4k
http://tinyurl.com/yc4zlsv
Egyptian huts recur with some frequency in Roman-period Nilotic scenes. The great mosaic evocation of Egypt in the Museo nazionale in Palestrina has at least two: a small peaked one close to the center of the composition and a larger curved one below it and to the left:
http://tinyurl.com/ykfrp5m
In this schematized view the first of these is a little below the number 10 and the second is under the number 15:
http://tinyurl.com/yj4ogzy
2) Pientius (d. 560). P. (in French: Pien, Pient) was bishop of Poitiers between St. Anthemius and St. Pascentius. Baudonivia tells us in her _Vita sanctae Radegundis_ (BHL 7049) that he supported St. Radegund in her foundation of the monastery of the BVM (later, of the Holy Cross) outside of his city.
3) Leander of Seville (d. 600 or 601). An older brother of St. Isidore of Seville, L. saw to I.'s education and preceded him as archbishop. The leading light of his time in the Visigothic church, he was a friend and correspondent of pope St. Gregory the Great, whom he had gotten to know ca. 580 when they were both in Constantinople. L. was the author of anti-Arian treatises which have not survived. He was credited with the conversion to Catholicism both of king Leovigild's son, St. Hermenigild (whose wife and whose mother were both Catholic), and of Leovigild's successor, king Reccared I. L.'s surviving writings are the closing sermon of the third council of Toledo (589) and a treatise _De institutione virginum et de contemptu mundi_ dedicated to his sister, St. Florentina.
Gregory the Great's _Moralia in Iob_ is addressed to L. Here's an illumination from an early twelfth-century manuscript (Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 168, fol. 5r; dated 1111) showing both of them at the head of G.'s prefatory letter to L.:
http://tinyurl.com/2u7nk5
And here again are the two of them, at the opening of the same letter in another twelfth-century manuscript, Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque de l’agglomération, ms. 12):
http://www.bml.firenze.sbn.it/gregorio/preview/img_schede_big/24.jpg
Expandable views of two other versions of this double portrait are here:
http://tinyurl.com/2rz8t3
4) Heldradus (also Eldradus; d. ca. 842). H., who is said to have been of Provençal origin, was the founder, in 726, of the abbey of Sts. Peter and Andrew at Novalesa in today's Piedmont near the Italian side of the pass of Mont-Cenis/Moncenisio. Devastated by a Muslim raid in about 906, after which the community relocated to its daughter house at Breme in southern Lombardy, the monastery experienced an uptick in its fortunes in the eleventh century, when as a priory of Breme it was substantially rebuilt and also received a written history in the form of its imaginative chronicle, the _Chronicon Novaliciense_. H. is one of its heroes, but neither from this source nor from his Vita (BHL 2445) do we really learn much about him. In his time the abbey operated a hospice at the Mt. Cenis Pass and also had a priory further to the southwest at Pagno (fairly close to the Lautaret Pass); their establishment is sometimes attributed to H.
The monastery at Novalesa was secularized in 1798 but was re-acquired by Benedictines in the early 1970s and was resettled in 1972 with monks from Venice. Restoration of the surviving buildings and conservation/restoration of their surviving mural paintings begain almost immediately. Some of the results are indicated below.
The abbey in winter:
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/images/dallalto-n_piero_small.jpg
Chapel of Sts. Heldrad and Nicholas (tenth-/eleventh-century; interior frescoes are of the later eleventh century):
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/s.Eldrado.htm
http://tinyurl.com/3dj6jr
Apse frescoes:
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/abside_eldrado.htm
Cycle of St. Heldrad:
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/ciclo_s.eldrado.htm
Cycle of St. Nicholas:
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/ciclo_s.nicola.htm
The eighteenth-century abbey chapel retains in its presbytery fragmentary frescoing from its eleventh-century predecessor. Shown is the stoning of St. Stephen:
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/images/affresco-s.stef_small.jpg
Twelfth-century fresco in the cloister:
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/images/01010094_small.jpg
The abbey has several free-standing chapels on the premises. Shown are:
St. Mary chapel (eighth-century.; restored in the eleventh century):
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/S_Maria.htm
St. Michael chapel (eighth-/ninth-century):
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/s.michele.htm
Holy Savior chapel (eleventh-century):
http://www.abbazianovalesa.org/salvatore.htm
5) Ansovinus (d. 868). According to his tenth-century Vita (BHL 555) by the monk Eginus or Iginus, A. (who signed himself Ansuinus and whose now customary name form is a back-formation in Latin from Italian Ansovino) came from a family of today's Camerino (MC) in the Marche and was Louis II's confessor. Elected bishop of Camerino, he at first refused the honor. When he finally did accept, he did so only after reaching an understanding with the king that he would be exempt from the latter's military service as he had now to serve the church alone.
A. was consecrated bishop by Leo IV. He took part in a council at Rome called by pope St. Nicholas I in 861. His Vita ascribes to him several miracles and notes both his generosity to the poor and his peacemaking among factions. P. died on this day in the eighteenth year of his episcopacy. His remains now lie in a late fourteenth-century sarcophagus in the crypt of Camerino's early nineteenth-century cathedral. P.'s cult spread from the diocese of Camerino into other parts of the Marche and into Umbria. Herewith some views of the originally eleventh-century church of Sant'Ansovino in the _frazione_ of Avacelli in today's Arcevia (AN) in the Marche, starting with the exterior:
A. was consecrated bishop by Leo IV. He took part in a council at Rome called by pope St. Nicholas I in 861. His Vita ascribes to him several miracles and notes both his generosity to the poor and his peacemaking among factions. P. died on this day in the eighteenth year of his episcopacy. His remains now lie in a late fourteenth-century sarcophagus in the crypt of Camerino's early nineteenth-century cathedral. P.'s cult spread from the diocese of Camerino into other parts of the Marche and into Umbria. Herewith some views of the originally eleventh-century church of Sant'Ansovino in the _frazione_ of Avacelli in today's Arcevia (AN) in the Marche, starting with the exterior:
http://www.cadnet.marche.it/arcevia/s_ansovino.html
http://tinyurl.com/2rbgzd
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torebue/1347969360/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cantarlontano/173493631/sizes/o/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cantarlontano/173492571/sizes/o/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torebue/1347982314/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cantarlontano/173492216/sizes/o/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cantarlontano/173492467/sizes/o/
Interior:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cantarlontano/173493241/sizes/o/
http://www.cadnet.marche.it/arcevia/foto_ans.html
Multiple views with some architectural details and some more glimpses of the scenic Colli Esini in which Arcevia is situated:
http://tinyurl.com/2udnzy
Some views of the originally twelfth-century former Benedictine monastery of Sant'Ansovino outside of Apecchio (PU) in the Marche:
http://tinyurl.com/cvgzkh
The bishop in this panel painting of two saints (the other is obviously St. Jerome) by Carlo Crivelli (d. ca. 1498), active in the Marche in the 1480s and 1490s, used to be identified as St. Augustine of Hippo. But the institution that possesses it, the Accademia di Venezia, convinced that it was part of a now dismembered triptych from the cathedral of Camerino, now identifies him as today's A.:
http://www.wga.hu/art/c/crivelli/carlo/saints.jpg
previous identification:
http://tinyurl.com/cs8ose
present identification:
http://tinyurl.com/cls6wf
6) Peter II of Cava (Bl.; d. 1208). Today's less well known holy person of the Regno was the ninth abbot, according to the standard numeration, of the monastery of the Most Holy Trinity at today's Cava de' Tirreni (SA) in Campania. But whereas the eighth abbot, Bl. Benincasa (10. January), died early in 1194, P.'s documents only begin in April 1995 and it is not until June 1196 that he appears as _abbas_ rather than _electus_. In between came a certain Roger, styled in Cava's charters from March to October 1194 as _venerabilis abbas_. 1194 was a year of political uncertainty in the principality of Salerno, as in the kingdom of Sicily as a whole, and it is interesting to note that Roger's ceasing to function as abbot followed closely upon Henry VI's capture and sack of the city of Salerno on 17. September 1194. Still, the exact relationship between Henry's accession to the throne of Sicily and P.'s accession to the abbatial throne at La Cava remains obscure.
The length of time it took the elected P. to sign himself as _abbas_ suggests that Roger was still alive in the first half of 1196 and that P. may have had to deal with factional opposition within the Cavensian community. Later tradition called him a peacemaker. According to John of Capua in 1295, P. was _magis mitis, inimicus utique litis_('greatly mild, consistently an enemy of strife'). His successor, Bl. Balsam (24. November), had to fight to regain abbey property alienated without the community's consent during Roger's time and P.'s. Like his predecessors -- except perhaps for the unfortunate Roger --, P. was buried in the Crypta Arsicia, the inner grotto of the cave against which the abbey was built. His cult was immediate. It was confirmed papally at the level of Beatus in 1928 in a job lot with seven other abbots from Simeon to Leo II.
7) Agnellus of Pisa (Bl.; d. 1236). Acting on the instructions of St. Francis, in 1217 the early Franciscan A. lead a party of brothers who established the order's first house in greater Paris. This was at Saint-Denis. Later A. opened another house in Paris proper and began his order's association with the university in that city. In 1224 he was sent to England at the head of another small party to begin making foundations there. After some time in Canterbury and London A. moved on to Oxford, established his order's school of theology at the university there, and in 1229 appointed Robert Grosseteste to teach in it. Matthew Paris is our source for Henry III's having employed A. as an intermediary between himself and the rebel Richard Marshal, third Earl of Pembroke.
Despite his associations with universities and with a court, A. is said to have insisted upon living in accordance with the Franciscan ideal of poverty. His cult was confirmed papally in 1892. The founder of his order's English Province, he has yet to receive an entry in the _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the additions of Sabinus of Hermopolis and Agnellus of Pisa)
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